Change Personal Experience With Organizational

Change

Personal Experience with Organizational Change

While working in a popular coffeehouse chain store, I experienced an attempt at organizational change that did was not especially successful. A new manager was brought in to our store when our old manager was promoted (largely due to the successful operations at our store), and without really changing the specific tasks of any individual, this manager attempted to rigidly define methods and procedures such that every person accomplished every task in exactly the same manner. While this might be ideal from some management perspectives, in an environment as fast-paced and employee-driven as this store it made for a greatly reduced efficiency and decreased employee satisfaction among the workforce, which had an even greater detrimental effect on productivity. The attempted change was from a flexible organization that could handle changing needs and situations to one that was codified, slow to act, and encountering many tasks in counterintuitive manners.

Needless to say, this change was not successful. The purpose behind the change, however, was valid; a more efficient system could be developed where certain tasks had more prescribed methods that were more firmly adhered to, but both the degree of change attempted and the method of implementation were wrong. Almost every step of the change process diagram in Osland et al. (pp. 638) was skipped, with the new manager jumping from the determination of a need for change (which appears even to have been made prior to this manager's arrival at our store) straight to the implementation of the change, with the subsequent evaluation of change only occurring due to the store's sudden drop in performance.

There are many things that could have been done better in order to avoid the problems that the store (and the new manager) ran into and implement the necessary change more effectively and efficiently. The need for "critical mass" to make change successful is a key feature described by Osland et al. (pp. 637) that was ignored by the manager; discussions with employees, perhaps at an open meeting, might have made it more apparent where change was needed, in order to make the organization run more smoothly and easier for everybody. The lack of shared vision from the earliest stages of the change process onward was hugely detrimental to the attempt at organizational change, and was received by the employees as an unnecessary imposition rather than a true and valid attempt to improve organization performance. Simply speaking with employees to better understand where change was needed and how it could best be implemented, and to make the employees themselves understand where change was needed, would have gone far in making this attempt at organizational change more successful.